


Winterfell's Bastard

by pieandsouffle



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: AU, Gen, also my favourite topic in got fanfiction, i love you but i despise the way you treat jon, oh catelyn, that dreaded pox that i cringe about whenever i hear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 06:45:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4169952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pieandsouffle/pseuds/pieandsouffle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The pox has left little Jon Snow weak but alive, and the prayer wheel, made by a mother for her children, served him well.  The Seven were kind, and the Seven were merciful, and Catelyn Stark will not back down on her vow to them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winterfell's Bastard

**Author's Note:**

> *Quiet sobbing* Catelyn, if only you had kept your promise. Anyway, how about unedited and un-proofread fic, right?
> 
> **edited and reposted 26/03/18**

The first time Jon opens his eyes, Catelyn feels – for a few, brief seconds – as though she cannot breathe.

 

His grey eyes (so like Ned’s) are fogged over and unfocussed, and there’s still a touch of blood dotted in the corners just beside his nose. A few days ago he had been weeping blood without restraint. But now it is just those spots, and his eyes are open and very, very much alive. His breath still rattles in his chest, and his frequent, throaty, awful coughs still make her heart clench in her chest, but the red rings of the pox are fading from his pale, clammy skin.

 

She places, against the voice in her head’s orders, a gentle hand to his face, and he twitches against the touch, his long eyelashes fluttering, and squints dazedly up at her.

 

He closes his eyes soon after, and even though seconds earlier she had been leaning over him, her own gaze fixed firmly on those grey eyes (so like little Arya’s), she does not believe that he saw her at all.

 

Catelyn lets Jon drift off back into a restful sleep, so different and relieving from the week of horror in which the poor child had moaned and breathed raggedly in spasms; the smouldering coals in the fireplace only bring more sweat to his brow and, by extension, more suffering.

 

As she pushes her fingers through the child’s dark hair absently, she looks to the end of the bed. To her surprise, the prayer wheel still resides at the foot of his bed, somehow untouched by Jon’s senseless movement.

 

She combs through those dark curls, and thinks of Robb.

 

***

 

The second time happens only hours later. Jon wakes, eyes still clouded, but there’s a spark of recognition in them that was never present before. The slightest crease forms between his eyebrows as he sees, what must be to him, a figure that despises him.

 

She doesn’t hate him. She certainly thought she did, but it took the gods near-fulfilling her wish to make her realise that.

 

She hates the idea of him.

 

The idea that her husband – the honourable Ned Stark – had condescended to bed a whore as soon as he left Winterfell. And then dared to bring the offspring back to be raised with his true children.

 

But Jon has done Catelyn no personal wrong. And to wish for his death was a crime. Arya loves no other person in the Winterfell more than Jon. Robb has no better friend.

 

Jon mumbles something that is quite lost to Catelyn, but she can guess that it is like to be her name. Or her title, at least: Jon addresses her only as Lady Stark or Lady Catelyn, or ‘your lady mother’ when he’s talking to Robb. Arya is too young to understand the meaning behind the title he gives only to Lady Catelyn.

 

     “Your fever has broken,” she tells him calmly and clearly, one hand still resting on his forehead. “Maester Luwin says you must rest, Jon.”

 

That registers to him, and he nods tiredly before he lapses back into a deep sleep. She may have been mistaken, but there was a hint of confusion in his eyes and a crease upon his brow. It is not unfounded. She has not ever referred to him by his first name, even when speaking to him, as rarely as that ever occurs.

 

There was relief in those eyes too. The poor boy must have distantly realised that he was dying for the entirety of his time drowning in the sickness.

 

The rest of them all did too.

 

They all thought – _knew_ – that he was going to die. Robb’s focus evaporated, he took no joy in the lessons instructed of him, his gaze always drifting up from the yard to the room in which his brother was dying slowly.

 

Sansa was old enough to realise what the connotations attached to _Snow_ truly meant _,_ enough like her mother to think ill of him for it, but too young to hold any sort of permanent grudge against the boy who had been nothing but nice to her from the day she was born.

 

And Arya… she would have stayed by Jon’s side if she had not been prevented from fear of infection. She threw tantrums more frequently than ever, and Catelyn found her crying into a fur more than once, hiccoughing sobs punctuating her pleas to ‘let Jon get better, pray to your gods for that!’

 

And Catelyn had obeyed.

 

Catelyn had never made a prayer wheel before, but the stakes were too high, and like it or not, Jon was a Stark by blood. He would never be a Tully, but a Stark he was and a Stark he would be, if that was what Ned truly desired. As she wove cloth around the sticks and bound them tightly together, she was uncomfortably reminded of her poisonous prayers to the Seven.

 

How many times did she pray for the gods to take him? She could not count. The second Ned brought the little babe home, Catelyn wished, venomously, for the boy to die.

 

And now, her wish had been nearly granted, but she turns her back on those unworthy pleas. Winterfell is for the Starks, and it is shameful to wish one dead in his own home. Jon is a Stark. And she will ensure he is recognised as one.

 

***

 

The third time Jon’s eyes flicker open, it is for good. Awake, proper, for the time in days and days of doubt, and the first thing he sees is his youngest sister. Arya screams when he focuses on her and smiles, and crawls up onto his bed, and wraps her tiny arms around him and buries her face into his shoulder. He hugs her back with just as much enthusiasm, but with far more exhaustion.

 

Robb got the pox once, when he was Arya’s age. His was a far less deadly strain that what Jon suffered though, and not contagious. And Robb had a mother, a father, a bastard brother, to whisper soothing words to him, and he settled peacefully into sleep. Jon writhed and whimpered, his only companions his father, whose duties pulled him away from more frequent visits, and Maester Luwin. Catelyn did not visit until the darkest night, too consumed with guilt to look upon the child she had cursed any earlier. The other children did not visit, but she caught Robb trying to sneak into Jon’s room one night early on, Arya clutching her brother’s hand.

 

Jon did not have a mother. And if Catelyn thrust aside her prejudice, her blatant dislike for the boy, and the tales and rules that had been pounded into her mind from an early age, she knew he deserved better. Jon Snow nearly died alone, a brother forbidden to see him, a father miserably occupied by duty, a sister who was too young to understand what was happening yet old enough to feel his loss, and a Lady of Winterfell, who had condemned him in the first place.

 

The same Lady of Winterfell who snubbed and ignored him oversees every interaction with her children. He is doubtless uncomfortable, but this is what he is used to, and he takes it in his stride- or his even breathing, now- most admirably. He speaks to her politely and gratefully, as he has always done, and giggles and adores Arya, and Cat feels something inside her shatter.

 

***

 

That night she lies quietly by Ned’s side, refusing to blow out the candle by her bedside. She watches it burn lower and lower, wax hardening like ice at its base, and the instant before it expires:

 

     “Ned?” she asks. Her husband does not reply immediately, having to weave his way out of sleep. But when he wakes fully, he replies.

 

     “Yes, Cat?”

 

The candle’s light dies, and they are in the dark.

 

     “I must speak to you about Jon.”

 

She hears him sigh. Catelyn knows what he expects to hear. A plea to have the bastard removed from Winterfell’s halls, sent somewhere else, _anywhere_ else, just out of Catelyn’s cool gaze.

 

     “What do you wish to say?” he asks her wearily. “I will not have him sent away. He is my blood.”

 

 _Bastard blood,_ Catelyn would have replied not two weeks before. And Ned’s voice would have stiffened, and he would have replied that Jon was his son as much as Robb or Bran, and Cat would have swept away in bitterness.

 

     “I do not want him sent away,” she tells Ned, and she can feel his confusion beside her. Catelyn has never, not to Ned, not to anyone, spoken of Jon other than to sniff disdainfully or beg his removal.

 

     “Then what do you want of him?” Ned asks, sitting up against the hard headboard of the bed. She can hear the perplexity in his voice, and she feels shame that this is so unexpected of her.

 

     “I want him to be your son. Not your bastard, your trueborn son.” Ned remains silent, as though the words do not properly register to him. Catelyn shuffles upright to match her husband. “Have him be given the name Stark, and be done with it.”

 

     “And you-” Ned stops, and starts again. “You will not resent this of him? I know of the shame you felt from my siring of Jon…”

 

     “Shame which was taken out on a child. Jon Stark will be my son too,” Catelyn tells him fiercely. “I will treat him as a son, he will raised as my son, I will love him as my son. He needs a mother, and a poor substitute I have been. Let me be his mother.”

 

Ned grabs her by her shoulders and hauls her close, pressing a whiskery, joyful kiss to her cheek. He laughs softly, and she playfully pushes him away, but she knows, to him at least, this is certainly a cause for celebration.

 

 

 


End file.
